A Full Circle Legal Journey

Eileen O’Neill Burke ’90 was in the sixth grade when former justice Mary Ann G. McMorrow spoke to Burke’s class about her career as a judge.

McMorrow went on to be the first woman to serve on the Illinois Supreme Court and as its first chief justice, and the adolescent Burke suddenly had a dream to chase: she wanted to be a judge.

“This was the 1970s, and there were not that many female judges,” says Burke. “[A female judge] was not a unicorn, but maybe an exotic bird that you don’t see that often.”

Enrolling at Chicago-Kent College of Law after completing her undergraduate degree seemed like the obvious next step for the fourth-generation Chicagoan, particularly someone who knew where she wanted her path to end.

“Kent really had the best trial program of any law school in the city,” she says. “I knew that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a trial attorney. Kent was a natural fit for me.”

As a student at Chicago-Kent, Burke joined Moot Court Honor Society and the trial advocacy team, which were “always my favorite classes: trial ad, evidence. If I’m being honest, it was because those were easier than studying the law. [It was] just getting up and talking. I could do that.”

She also credits Chicago-Kent’s legal writing program for helping to prepare her for her next steps on her path toward her goal of being a judge.  

Burke started her legal career writing briefs in the appeals division at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.

“They made me a supervisor within five months of being in appeals,” she says. “That was all because of exactly what I had learned at Kent. We were ahead of the curve because we had done so much writing and all the things that you need to know in order to be effective as a writer.”

She then started covering trials, even investigating cases of alleged sexual abuse leveled against the Archdiocese of Chicago, and eventually moved to felony review, a division of the prosecutor’s office that is available around the clock to review felony cases prior to charges being filed. After five years of late nights at police stations with a young son at home, Burke wanted some stability. That’s when she switched to criminal defense.

“There’s a wide network of former state’s attorneys who were doing defense, and they all needed people to start covering cases for them,” she says. “I started doing defense just by covering cases for people.”

She eventually grew her one-off cases into a thriving defense practice, which provided her with a completely different view of the courtroom than anything else she had seen.

“I learned so much being a defense attorney, and it made me so much better as a judge,” she says. “You see both sides, and you really understand the pressures of both sides, too.”

She continues, “If I hadn’t had that experience, I don’t know that I would have been as balanced as I was on the bench, and that’s a mark of a good judge.”

After eight years as a defense attorney, Burke felt ready to make her middle-school dreams a reality. She ran for a seat on the Circuit Court of Cook County and won.

The job was everything that she hoped it would be. She describes it as “the best job in government.”  

She spent eight years presiding over criminal and civil cases before being elected a justice of the First District Appellate Court, covering Cook County. But despite how much she loved her job, she couldn’t shake a little voice in the back of her head telling her  “This isn’t working.”

“Nobody has any faith in the justice system,” she says. “The defendants don’t have faith, the victims don’t have faith, and none of the practitioners have any faith in the justice system right now.”

Despite working her dream job—and not being ready to step down from the bench—there was a little voice in the back of her mind that started to become stronger, giving her the idea—and confidence—that she could be a great state’s attorney.  

“It needed somebody who’s been on both sides, who’s been at every vantage point to right the ship,” she says. “If I wasn’t going to do it, I didn’t know who was going to do it.”

After convincing her husband that she wasn’t crazy for giving up her dream job, she threw her hat into the ring with his backing.  

Still, the experience was not what she expected.  

“If I had any idea of how difficult that was going to be, I probably would have never done it,” she says. “I’m an introvert, and that election was nothing like a judicial election. In judicial elections, everybody’s pretty nice to you. It’s not the bare knuckles brawl that this election was. I was a little bit unprepared for that.”

But after enduring the election cycle, Burke was elected as Cook County State’s Attorney. She won approximately 67 percent of the vote in the general election on November 5, 2024.  

She became the second Chicago-Kent alum to earn the honor: Anita Alvarez ’86 served from 2008–16.

“I want to make the entire system work better, and we’re already making significant changes to the office and how we approach things and how we do things,” she says. “I want everyone who works here to feel like they’ve made a difference and that they’ve made the world a better place because they’ve worked here.”

Clare McWilliams, a retired judge in the 10th Subcircuit of the Cook County Judicial Circuit Court, says that it’s natural for Burke to set high standards for herself.

“I really think she’s a renaissance woman. She does so much. She’s brilliant. She’s fair,” says McWilliams, a longtime friend of Burke. She continues, “When I look at the scales of justice, that symbol resonates with me when I think of Eileen. She is truly blind to any prejudices that anyone has. She follows the evidence and the facts and just stays straight down that road and has no fear.”

A central part of Burke’s strategy for the state’s attorney’s office is to develop a training program for prosecutors, which she hopes to turn into a model that other prosecutors’ offices across the country can build on.

Teaching and training has always been a passion for Burke. She developed a training program on civil procedure for Illinois judges, and since 2012, she has taught it to every incoming justice statewide.

She also served as president of the Illinois Judges Association. Through that organization, she made in-school programming a priority—bringing her story full circle.

“The Illinois Judges Association was a perfect vehicle for utilizing the very, very limited bully pulpit that judges have in an effective way,” she says. “I presented to thousands of high school and grade school students. I’m proof positive that having somebody come and talk to you could give somebody an idea that they may never have had before about what they want to do with their career.”